It was great to have dinner with Dani, Gayle, and Mom. Fortunately, the weather was good. We picked a restaurant with outdoor dining and chose a Monday, because restaurants are usually least crowded on Mondays. I can’t imagine what this place is like on the weekends, because it was definitely hopping on Monday. It’s easy to see why. The food was unique and quite good.

We had an unusual neighborhood event. One of the cyclists invited neighborhood cyclists to a 20 mile bike ride to Savage Mill Mall. Six of us took the ride. I’ve made this ride many times. It’s mostly on trails. It is very well shaded. And it terminates at a bakery. I had given up on the bakery. Their food was expensive and not very good. What I didn’t know is that the bakery was taken over by Roggenart. I ate my food bar while everybody else had a nice pastry. Lesson learned.

I’m not sure if I’ve already said this, but I stopped supporting our neighborhood’s office computers. I still support our website and a resident database, but all other computer support has been turned over to Bob. This week we hired a new events coordinator. We needed a new Email address and a few other changes. It felt very strange, because people were still sending requests to me. I kept on forwarding requests, questions, and answers between the players. I hope we finally have everybody wired up so requests go where they should go next time. One nice thing — Bob called me with a question about about our office network. I was on the Savage Mill ride and didn’t return the call for a couple of hours. Fortunately, the documentation I had written included the information he needed. He was able to do everything without my help. It’s nice when effort becomes useful.

That’s it for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We’re having plenty of entertainment last week and this. Last Saturday was a concert at Lurman Woods. We attended the last symphony concert of the season Sunday. We had a total if three food trucks this week. We’re leaving in a bit to attend the play “Night Watch” at Essex Community College. When we get home, it’s a free ice cream party at the clubhouse. Dani and Gayle are down visiting Mom. We’re all going out together for dinner Tuesday.

With all that excitement, there’s no room for news! I hope this finds everybody doing well.

The Navy Sea Chanters last Sunday were quite good, but they only did one sea chant. I guess all the other chants weren’t suitable for a family concert in a church.

We had a bang-up day planned for Friday. It was sunny and very hot. I took an easy bike ride on well-shaded trails. I was just about to turn around and head home when my gear shifter stopped working. The cable broke. The bike has four cables. This is the most important one. There is no such thing as a jury rig fix for a broken cable. Good thing it was an easy ride. There were a few hills I had to walk up, but it wasn’t all that bad. When I got home I drank water in the air conditioning for a while, then I removed my jury rig bike rack and took off for the bike shop. It’s almost all down hill from our house to the bike shop, but I still had to some walking to do. Danita gave me a ride home. By the time we got home and had dinner, we missed the Marine Corps band concert. After dinner, we went downstairs to watch the last of our recorded TV shows for the season. About half way through, the shows were preempted by the President’s comments following the mass shooting in Texas. We could have streamed the show, but it felt like the perfect ending for a bummer of a day. We called it quits.

Today is perfect weather — cool and sunny. Too bad I won’t be riding.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We had a busy week. Bud will be needing memory care before long. When he goes to memory care, we will move him to a facility that is closer to Danita and Ed. Way back when, Bud chose Riderwood because it was close to his church and his old neighborhood. Riderwood is a bit of a drive for Danita, and it is a heck of a drive for Ed. We spent the week visiting memory care providers that are close to Danita and a shorter drive for Ed. It was a rough week for Danita. We found two providers that look like a good fit. That’s good news. We wrapped up the week on a lighter note with a neighborhood party last night.

My second cataract surgery was last Monday. Everything went well. I was driving Tuesday. My vision is much improved.

Schools are out or will be out soon. The weather is warm. The days are long. It’s the summer season. We attended our first outdoor concert at Lurman Woods last Sunday. It looks like this weekend will be rainy and mushy. We probably won’t go this weekend. But we’re looking forward to hearing the US Navy band Sea Chanters, performing indoors Sunday.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Sunday ushered in days of perfect weather, so naturally I spent a good chunk of the morning locked in a windowless basement room counting money. Afterwards I spent the afternoon driving. We went down I-81, enjoying the scenic Blue Ridge mountains on the way to Roanoke. Roanoke was a very good destination because it’s on the way to Jul’s house, Bryon was being confirmed Tuesday, … AND … there were negative COVID tests all around. Woo-Hoo. For dinner, we enjoyed al fresco dining at a very good Mexican restaurant next door to our hotel. The weather was still picture perfect. The food was plentiful and good and cheap. We topped our dinner with large fried ice creams. Back at the hotel, the indoor pool was filled with kids and Moms. Danita wisely chose to use the pool early Monday morning, and had the pool all to herself.

We got to Jul’s on Memorial day. This was an unusual visit. We hadn’t been there since COVID. It was the tail end of a holiday. We weren’t taking the grandkids on any adventures. But we managed to get into the swing of things eventually. Bryon’s confirmation was at 7. The priest gave a very good homily about the sacraments in general and confirmation in particular. When Jul asked Bryon what kind of cake he wanted, he said he wanted Chick-fil-A nuggets. So we that was dinner. I was surprised how good they are. Jul picked up a cake at the last minute. Bryon has an unusual name with unusual spelling. Based on past experiences, Jul decided it was better to leave the inscription to just “Congratulations”.

We took two days going back. Going up I-95 was less scenic and had heavier traffic, but it let us stop at Bud’s on the way home to drop off clean clothes and pick up dirty. We stopped overnight in Richmond. The hotel wasn’t nearly as nice. But we took the opportunity to visit the Edgar Poe museum and we found a pleasant restaurant for dinner. We were back in town, safe and sound Thursday.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Mom had a CD in her trust at Chase Bank. The CD matured recently. Chase send a letter saying if we didn’t want to roll it over, we could call or visit a branch. We wanted to sell the CD and move the money to Mom’s Chase savings account. We called. The customer service rep could not sell the CD. So we went to a “local” branch, about half an hour away. Not counting the driving, it took them two hours. As an apology, they gave us a free cloth bag. It isn’t very sturdy. I can’t imagine a bank that is harder to do business with. As a topper, I checked the account today. The CD is gone. The deposit to savings is marked “pending”. Pending what? Its moving money between two of Mom’s accounts. I can’t imagine why the transfer is pending.

The construction on the back of our house is finally done done done. I spent some time cleaning up some junk behind the house. A few years ago, I tried to paint the porch. I did a terrible job. We hired Pete to paint it for us. It looks great. The contractor will be doing a few days of work on the front of our house, probably starting next week. We won’t have access to our garage during the day, but they move the scaffolding away every night. That will let us charge the Leaf. The contractor will be working on the other buildings most of the summer. After this is all done, we have a huge mud field behind our house. All houses have to be cleaned and painted. Our road needs some work. Some people have stone falling off their walls. There’s probably a bunch more. I know everything will be put in good shape eventually. Still, it’s destressing to think about.

The yard junk put a big dent in a 55 gallon trash bag. In addition, plastic drain pipe was brittle from 10 years in the sun. That filled the rest of the bag. I also had a huge foam block that used to be in our Honda’s trunk where the spare tire is now. I put all this together today and made my first dump run in many years. I still miss Car Talk.

Our big excitement was last Sunday. Joe and Toni were up from Texas to attend a friend’s wedding. All the Schmauses got together at Ed’s house for lunch. The food was good. The conversation was better. There are a few pics on the website.

The big news was a visit to Jaijai, Mark, and Mira. Mira has advanced in every way since we saw her last. She has a good vocabulary of spoken words and obviously understands a lot more than she can say. She frequently understands normal adult sentences. It was supposed to be rainy, but mostly we lucked out. We were able to visit a playground Saturday. We had a couple of very nice meals out, including one of the best tasting curry I have ever had. Adding to the peaceful atmosphere was a Buddha fountain and a most intriguing tree. I even took a posed picture, but somehow I lost the picture. After that lunch, we took an impromptu walk to another playground which turned out to be Mira’s highlight. The playground had a tall slide with gentle humps. Mark sat her about half way up and helped her down the slide, with Jiajia at the bottom to catch her. As soon as she went down one time, she immediately said “more, more”. She probably went down a half dozen times before she had enough. You can see that pic and more by visiting the website.

Mom asked me to take her to Home Depot so she could look fort a new light. We found one she liked for $44.97. It was out of stock. So we went back to her apartment and went to the Home Depot website. They had it available, same price. When I went to order it, I got a large pop-up that we were just $.03 short of the minimum order for free shipping. Otherwise, we could pay $9. That was too bad … for Home Depot. Don’t they realize they aren’t the only game in town? After that bit of rudeness, Mom was quite amenable to looking on Amazon. We found one she liked equally well. Shipping was free, thanks to my Prime membership. And it was a few bucks cheaper. Wake up and sharpen your pencils, B & M. It’s a new world out there.

Today is Preakness. It just might be the hottest Preakness ever. The high temperature is supposed to be 95, with plenty of humidity. Tomorrow is almost as hot as today. I decided this is an excellent time to take a day or two off from biking.

I had surgery on my right eye Monday. Everything went fine. I’ll get my left eye done in 3 weeks. That’s all for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Monday featured my first 45 mile ride of the year. It was hard. I took 6 hours doing it. Tuesday we visited the Mormon temple in DC. It was open for visitors for the first time in 50 years. Also my budget database came up with a bug. It took me four hours to find and fix it. Wednesday was cleaning the porch in preparation for painting. Later on today (Friday) we will drive up to Lewisburg, PA to visit JAMM for the weekend. While we’re there, we’re hoping Pete will be able to paint the porch. Throw in normal activities and a little pickle ball and it feels like quite a busy week.

We even have a little drama for a topper. The neighborhood brings in dumpsters once a year. They’ll be here this weekend. I’m hoping they come before we leave. I have several long lengths of piping that the previous owner installed for drainage. With all the construction, I removed the piping and found it was creating problems rather than being helpful. I would love to get that piping in the dumpster, if the dumpster is set up in time.

After spending a day taking care of a bum tire on the Leaf the other week, I decided we should have a spare tire for the Honda. Honda offered a spare tire when we bought the car. At the time, we decided to save the bucks, but now I think that wasn’t the best decision I’ve ever made. The tire came in, but the jack is delayed. Hopefully we’ll have an uneventful drive to Lewisburg. At worst, we’ll only need to borrow a jack from a good Samaritan. When I ordered the tire, the parts guy wasn’t sure how well it would fit, due to the hybrid battery. The parts guy wanted to come out and see how it fits. He swung his legs onto the parts counter and slid under the plastic COVID shield all while holding the tire in one hand. Young people are such show-offs. The tire fits fine.

When we get back from Mark’s I have cataract surgery Monday. I’ll have a couple of days of restrictions. I’m looking forward to getting normal vision in one eye.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Last week I forgot to mention we watched a delightful movie last week. It’s “My Cousin Vinny” (1992). If you haven’t seen it, it’s a hoot.

I help count the collection for our church once every four weeks. There’s been a strong push to make the count exact. The collection is comprised of many separate collections (regular weekly, Easter, Missions, etc.) We count each collection separately, recording results in an Excel file, one worksheet per collection. Then we throw everything into one pot and count the whole enchilada. Cash is tedious but fairly straightforward. Checks have been troublesome. Checks can have any value. We can’t bin them by check value because we don’t know ahead of time what all the values will be. With no bins, we don’t have a way to focus on where an error is. Last week’s count was $30 off. We had been working for four hours. It was 2:00 and there was no way we could re-count all the checks again.

This week I wrote a new worksheet that reads all the checks, bins them, and prints the sorted result. We ran the new spreadsheet against last week’s file and quickly found the error was in a small subset of all the checks. The next time this happens, we should be able to quickly find and correct the discrepancy.

The worksheet consumed me for most of the week, but it was a lot of fun. I have done a lot of this kind of work with Access and Word but not with Excel. Plus I have forgotten much more than I remembered. I had two screens. The left screen was for Google searches. The right screen was for the spreadsheet. I spent more time reading than writing. Now it’s done, it works, and it should be a big help going forward.

Danita ran into an unexpected obstacle when visiting Bud this week. Because there is a COVID case in assisted living, visitors have to have evidence of having passed a COVID test before entering. Visitors can go to the medical suite and get a test, but that would take a lot of extra time. There were several people trying to get in and much confusion. One couple decided to do a “window visit”. The weather was nice and their parent is on the ground floor. The parent didn’t know how to open the window, so the they used their cell phone to called the parent. It was a kind of low-tech Zoom.

Danita happened to have a picture of the results from our Easter test on her phone. She offered that and was admitted. She was lucky to get in because the entry clerk can swipe up and see the date the picture was taken. Moving forward, she will take a test at home before she visits Bud.

We were supposed to have the “Greek on the Street” food truck Friday. This is one of the better food trucks that visits. The Joneses and we were planning to have a food truck dinner together. Unfortunately, the bums cancelled. We decided to do a carry out dinner instead. Cheese steak sandwiches aren’t very healthy, but they’re no worse than Greek French Fries with Feta cheese.

That’s a lot of news for one week. I hope everybody is doing well.